After securing the necessary funds on its Kickstarter page, and after enduring Lindsay Lohan’s trademark version of “professionalism,” The Canyons looks like it will finally be released next month. The film, which was written by Bret Easton Ellis and directed by Paul Schrader, got its first official trailer this week.
The Canyons Gets a Trailer
dear Danez Smith
“But poems are not poems if they make people feel dead. I want people to feel alive – even if it is alive with grief.” The Guardian profiles poet Danez Smith about poetry; race, gender, and queerness; and their poetry collection, Don’t Call Us Dead (a finalist for the National Book Award). Pair with: an essay on writing that gives shape and depth to victims of criminal injustice.
On Velvet
Recommended Listening: Mary Gaitskill talks about her new book The Mare with host David Naimon. Pair with Chelsea Voulgares’s Millions interview with the author.
●
●
A Response to the Death of Writing
“Why, after all, do writers write? What is the impulse, the insistence on story, on seeing and representing the world? It has little to do with technology although everything to do with narrative, which is a purpose that, on the surface, technology also seems to share. The difference is that the writer creates narrative with intention, whereas technology merely gathers, or processes, information, leaving interpretation, analysis, up to us.” Let’s just say David L. Ulin doesn’t think Joyce would work for Google.
Tuesday New Release Day: Johnson; Ford; Millet; Hunter; Kadare; Jin; Rash; Self
Out this week: The Laughing Monsters by Denis Johnson; Let Me Be Frank With You by Richard Ford; Mermaids in Paradise by Lydia Millet; Ugly Girls by Lindsay Hunter; Twilight of the Eastern Gods by Ismail Kadare; A Map of Betrayal by Ha Jin; Something Rich and Strange by Ron Rash; and Shark by Will Self. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great Second-half 2014 Book Preview.
●
●
An Existential Test
“It is a privilege and a gift and an honor to be a debut author, but it is, above all things, an existential test.” Courtney Maum writes about the darker side of publishing a first book.
●
●
My Neighbor, the Poet Laureate
Poets & Writers magazine has posted my interview with my Brooklyn neighbor and U.S. Poet Laureate Philip Levine, along with a lovely recording of him reading his poem “The Mercy.” It’s worth a listen.